English

Nuclear effects in the proton-deuteron Drell-Yan process

High Energy Physics - Phenomenology 2015-06-19 v2 High Energy Physics - Experiment Nuclear Theory

Abstract

We compute the nuclear corrections to the proton-deuteron Drell-Yan cross section for inclusive dilepton production, which, when combined with the proton-proton cross section, is used to determine the flavor asymmetry in the proton sea, dbar - ubar. In addition to nuclear smearing corrections that are known to be important at large values of the nucleon's parton momentum fraction x_N, we also consider dynamical off-shell nucleon corrections associated with the modifications of the bound nucleon structure inside the deuteron, which we find to be significant at intermediate and large x_N values. We also provide estimates of the nuclear corrections at kinematics corresponding to existing and planned Drell-Yan experiments at Fermilab and J-PARC which aim to determine the dbar/ubar ratio for x < 0.6.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1405.2039,
  title  = {Nuclear effects in the proton-deuteron Drell-Yan process},
  author = {P. J. Ehlers and A. Accardi and L. T. Brady and W. Melnitchouk},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1405.2039},
  year   = {2015}
}

Comments

26 pages, 6 figures; Fig. 2 and typos corrected, published version

R2 v1 2026-06-22T04:09:32.403Z